· BEST SERIAL KILLER"And the winner is ...Brad Friedman [in] "Dead Boyz Cant Fly,"' as the murdering
transvestite who gulps several quarts of pills, engages in a fight to the death with a
Vietnam-vet-turned-janitor, gets his throat slit ear to ear, but FINISHES THE MOVIE."

· BEST ACTION FLICK"And the winner is ..."Dead Boyz Cant Fly,"' the sensitive story of a
mama-hating transvestite, a rapist who teaches yo-yo tricks to little boys and a
dimwitted, vaguely ethnic hood who team up to terrorize an office building on Memorial Day
weekend by blasting their way through the offices of a lawyer, a doctor, a dentist and --
most hated of all -- the guy who runs the EMPLOYMENT AGENCY."

CUTLINE:: Transvestite punk psycho Brad Friedman turns patriotic after
getting his throat slit by a crazed Nam-vet janitor.
By Joe Bob Briggs
Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas
Speaking of killer geeks, this week's flick is "Dead Boyz Cant
Fly," the sensitive story of a mama-hating transvestite, a rapist who
teaches yo-yo tricks to little boys, and a dimwit vaguely ethnic hood who
team up to terrorize an office building on Memorial Day weekend by
blasting their way through the offices of a lawyer, a doctor, a dentist,
and--most hated of all--the guy who runs the EMPLOYMENT AGENCY. Somewhere
along the way, the murdering transvestite gulps several quarts of pills,
engages in a fight to the death with a Vietnam-vet-turned-janitor, gets
his throat slit ear to ear, but FINISHES THE MOVIE.
This is one of those New York independent dealies
that goes so far off the violence scale that Congressmen stand in line to
blame it for the crime rate in the Bronx. There are Mafia hitmen who would
throw up if they saw this movie. There's one scene where one of the punks
poses as a doctor and "examines" Delia Sheppard that will make
women wake up screaming thirty years from now. There's a disgusting scene
in an elevator where Marilyn Monroe look-alike Ruth Collins gets molested
at knifepoint that goes on and on and ON.
Of course, I loved it.
It satisfies the first rule of great drive-in
moviemaking: Anyone can die at any moment.
And it satisfies the second rule: Just when you
think you know who's gonna die next, you're WRONG.
Fifteen dead bodies. Eleven breasts. Mannequin
bashing. Death by yo-yo. Non-elective tooth extraction. Dental drilling.
The old head-in-the-filing-cabinet torture. Disinfectant in the eyes.
Corpse mutilation. CPR with a frayed electrical cord. Bullet through the
forehead. Do-it-yourself tourniquet. Throat-slicing. Hanging.
Thirteen-story swan dive onto the pavement. Gratuitous topless dancing.
Gratuitous hockey mask. Ambulance Fu. Drive-In Academy Award nominations
for David John, as the Vietnam vet janitor-by-day, writer-by-night who
says "The enemy is here, and he's one of ours"; Ruth Collins, as
the bimbo who LAUGHS at the chief punk and doesn't live to tell about it;
Jason Stein, as the most normal of the psychos, for saying "You
spoiled my day, and now you ruined my evening, bitch!"; Brad
Friedman, as the transvestite drughead ringleader who binds and gags his
Mama and says "It's what you always wanted--a little girl!" and
"I'm a sociopath, lady"; Daniel J. Johnson, as the dim-bulb thug
who says "You killed him for nothing!"; and Howard Winters, the
producer/director, for doing things the drive-in way.
Four stars.
Check it out.
If you've got the guts for this kind of thing,
check out the UNRATED version

Umm.
When a street thug gets his (admittedly juvenile) artwork
laughed at in a sleazy employment agency, he and two cohorts
with varying levels of sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies
terrorize everyone on that floor of the office building,
brutally raping and killing with subhuman abandon.
That didn't turn out to be much of a b-movie, did it? It
was definitely low-budget, and an independent production, and
it was chock full of sex and violence... But it wasn't
"entertaining" in the common sense of the word. "Nauseating"
and "cruel" are the words I would choose instead, not of the
filmmaker per se, but of the dead-on characters about whom he
chose to make a film.
Really, this was a character study, mostly of the leader of
the thugs, "Goose," with his intense issues with his mother
and his twitchy, bipolar mannerisms. Plot wasn't much of an
issue, which kept it from really being hackneyed; even the
Vietnam vet janitor, who ostensibly "saves the day," doesn't
keep anyone from getting killed; he only makes it out alive.
Good performances all around (except for the police
detectives)...
Hell, I'm dancing around the issue. This movie was damned
disturbing, and it was meant to be. There are people like
Goose and his friends running around the world, people who
seem to have been born without souls. The greed and lust for
power which are the normal b-movie bad-guy motivations are
clean and fun and easily understandable, but the raw need to
inflict pain that these sociopaths exhibited was something
alien and shocking. And yet they were written and performed so
well that I couldn't help but be captivated by them against my
will -- the "fascination of the abomination," so to speak.
While I applaud the performance of "Goose," I feel sorry
for the poor actor who had to subsume himself in such a vile
character for the entire production, and I stand in awe of the
writer and the director who could immerse himself in such
unvarnished brutality for an even longer length of time.
Only a couple of technical complaints: The vet's stripper
girlfriend was completely extraneous, and Goose's slit throat
was very obviously fake.
I'm sorry to any of you who saw this and were clubbed out
of the blue; I'll try to screen the movies better for the
future.
Some notable totables (for the unrated director's cut):

6 breasts

17 killings

5 explosions (all in stock footage from Vietnam)

2 rapes

1 Marilyn Monroe impression

1 Marilyn Manson impression

1 actor who has appeared on
Star Trek

Scott Thompson Baker, "Officer Adler", appeared on an
episode of DS9 in 1998